How much different would conversations be if, instead of asking “what do you do?”, you asked “who are you?”
“What do you do” forces someone to describe themselves in the way they make money. It’s almost certainly not illustrative of the person who works in the job.
“Who are you?” clarifies. The person who answers must think. They must peel back layers to try and describe themselves.
One of these questions most often asks someone to put on a mask. The other mandates they remove it.
It’s often referred to, and one often thinks of it as some place deep, deep underwater. In my experience, it seems to be much closer-just right below the water line. Light can permeate into it, but it requires some work. Once you get there, and once you access it, and once you learn from it, come back up. The world above water will be quite different than before you went down.
Reboot, by Jerry Colonna, asks a marvelous question: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I wish to avoid?” It’s a very stealthily difficult, probing question to think about. One of the things it may bring to the forefront is how many of us try and not disappoint others, and thereby we very much disappoint ourselves in the process. We live lives other people, we think, would want us to live. We do things we think others wish us to do. We put our emotions on auto pilot to be this “other” for someone else, while never taking the time to decipher if we, ourselves, wish to be the “other.” Another way: we never think about who we may be or what we may want inside. Disappointment has a way of taking up space in your head. It’s an automatic door closer to possibilities in the world that our true selves would be open to. It takes time to de-clutter the mind and understand our expectations for ourselves, rather than other’s expectations of us, but it’s a job well worth the effort.
The idea is this: You use something that has the capacity to do multiples of what you can do on your own, for your benefit. Leverage is selling a product where you make money while you sleep. Leverage is writing timeless content that does not expire. It’s allowing the thing to compound on it’s own with little to no input from you. Leverage usually does not require your presence and many times it’s better that you not be present, for fear of making an emotional mistake.
Your relationships-the relationships that mean the world to you, do not work on leverage. They work in a linear fashion. They compound slowly, but you have to constantly feed it, over and over. You must invest your own sweat, time, blood, tears, presence in these relationships. The payoffs are enormous. Lifechanging.
The trick is to use leverage in your work and financial sphere, to provide you the opportunities to use linearity in you personal one.
Much of my life has been spent reading and ruminating on things and then, quite quickly, forgetting those things. I’ve made a mental note (the irony does not escape me) to act more. You can, if you so choose, read endless articles, books and listen to endless podcasts that discuss the meaning of life and what you should be doing with your time. You can, if you so choose, define success for yourself (though society typically has a way of defining this for you.) You can ponder all of these things and convince yourself that you’re making progress to some goal-some North Star in the distance, on the horizon.
Action is different. You cannot lie about action. It is binary. Either you acted, or you didn’t. Either you moved closer to the thing you said you’d move closer to, or you stood still. You cannot say you will pick up your children from school and then not pick them up (without some pretty interesting conversations happening with your spouse afterwards.) For all my years pondering and thinking about things, outside of regurgitating ideas from some other authors, I am no closer to a capital T truth about life, or meaning or consciousness, or money, or any of the other things that fascinate me. I will, instead, focus on action, to see where I go when one foot lands in front of the other. To which direction I move and then, after I’ve moved, take a moment and thank about what’s next, knowing that the thought itself is almost irrelevant without taking the next step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that.
You have to be ok with leaking ships, and knowing that, throughout your life, and throughout your everyday existence, you will want to fix more things than you actually can. Sometimes, by a large factor. If you push aggressively against this, if you try and have 4 arms instead of 2, or brrrrrr yourself into working harder, you’ll generally fall deeper into the efficiency and productivity hole, and become ever more frustrated. If you, instead, accept that this is a natural part of life, it may help clarify the important things, so that the other permanently fall off. They become so unimportant, that they are no longer leaks.
Quite often, without you even knowing most of the time, you’ll present yourself with a problem. And then your mind will immediately race to solutions. The mind will then internally debate which one makes the most sense, and take into account factors like speed, cost, affect/effect on others, and a million other tiny things, and, after a period of time, the mind will come up with an imperfect solution. You’ll then find a myriad number of reasons that you never thought of before that confirm that the decision your are about to, or have made, is the right one. This is all about control. Controlling variables you can’t possibly control. Finding solutions to problems that allow you to move onto the next problem and try and solve that one. There is no end to this. It’s one wave leading you to the other.
The other possibility is to imagine a world where you control very little, if anything. A world where a decision leads to an incalculable number of other things that come into existence that you would have never dreamed of. This possibility, in this world, allows you to simply view these things. View them as they pass and view them as they turn into the next thing. And instead of solving or controlling anything, you let go of one thing, and then another, until you ultimately realize there’s not much you can control at all. And once you do that, you can let go of more and more things, and just view them as they pass by.
People generally use the term “agency” in some manufactured way. Its use complicates the simplicity of the term. Agency is freedom. Agency is choice. When someone says that they have given up agency, what they’re saying in a roundabout way is that they, themselves, have given up the ability to choose something for themselves. The discomfort surrounding this is a direct result of just how fundamental agency is for our growth as individuals.
People typically say they want to feel in control of their decision making and time. That’s not entirely right. People do not wish to give up control of their decision making and time. They’re perfectly happy not making a decision or not choosing wisely how their time, so long as they are the author.
As you age, agency, more than money or power or fame or anything else, becomes more prominent, more cherished. The sandglass keeps pouring out, and you grasp for whatever specks are left.
People always tend to comment about the innocence of children. They say children’s innocence has been “ripped away” or that “innocence has been taken” by some tragic event. That’s very true and incredibly unfortunate.
Perhaps the more interesting part of a child’s (or a pet’s) innocence, is that the innocence is the default position. There are no zero sum games. Everything is new and wondrous and available and present. It’s pure consciousness. As a parent, when you observe this, yes, you find it heartwarming, but also eye opening. We are, all of us, born into a positive relationship with everything and everyone. We are, all of us, at one time early on, transfixed by the wonder of the mundane and the seemingly unending joy of play. We are unlimited and infinite.
We say we lose these things because of “life” but that may be false. Life doesn’t take away innocence inasmuch as the guardians of innocence mandate you abandon it. Imagine if we were never required to.
Between the endless business books on strategy and messaging and the 5 things to do to generate revenue, lies a really clear lesson from all of the old stories and all of the old books and all of the old fables. This lesson (and these lessons) have always been there because there is nothing new under the sun, but people have to package these lessons in different ways to sell different things, each time they do that, they bring a particular opacity to the thing, so that it seems much harder to see when it really isn’t.
Help people.
Help people find a home. Help people find a car. Help people find a hammer. Help people find a nail. Help people navigate medicine. Help people reconnect to themselves.
If you can help people, and you can do it from a place of love, rather than a place of expectation, you’re 3/4 of the way there. If you can help people and you can keep your costs down, you are 4/5 of the way there. If you can help people and you can charge more later, and the people are still begging for your help, you’re all the way home. You’ve created what Warren Buffet calls a moat. A barrier around you that your competitors cannot get around or climb through.
The most important part here is not to have expectations. If you expect that people will come to you, you will be disappointed. If you expect you will make ‘x” you will be disappointed. If you expect that you will grow to “x” number of people, you will be disappointed. You will be disappointed if you don’t grow to this magical number and you will be disappointed if you do (because you thought it would feel much better.)
The first step is simply to help. The next step will come naturally after that. If you listen long enough, you’ll know what the step after that will be.
You may not have all the answers, but you will always have your truth.